Light & Sie is proud to present Sehnsucht (Aspiration), a group exhibition of paintings, photographs, video and works on paper organized by Georges Armaos. The works selected are a mix of emerging and well established international artists. Contemporary abstract painting is approached through works by Ingrid Calame, David Reed and Dan Walsh. Photography is represented with works by Vanessa Beecroft, Todd Eberle, Thomas Ruff, Hedi Slimane and Jeremy Kost while two important projections by Kimsooja and Joseph Dadoune complete the exhibition.

The original theme of this exhibition was an attempt to question and investigate the notion of beauty in contemporary art and how it is approached by artists working in a variety of mediums. As in every group show, large or small, this one attempts to bring together a number of works and in the process elicit some answers or even generate more questions on the state of contemporary art today. It is also an effort to detect how the selection of proposed work will coexist and converse in the same space. Even if the exhibition focuses on the 20th Century art world “model,” with those artists working in Europe and the US, the national origin and multiple identities of the artists represented in this show as well as the subjects they address through their work will also lend the possibility of grasping parts of what has become a globalized art world starting in the early 1990s and continuing with an increasingly fast pace.

The artists have been selected based on a desire to question where things are in the dialectics between abstract and figurative work that begun roughly a century ago and continues until today. Abstraction in painting has been a capital result of the 20th century artistic experimentations. The works of Calame, Reed, and Walsh constitute as many different approaches through the lack of easily recognizable imagery and at times the approach of pure formal questions of color, composition and organization of the picture plane. Photography, that began as a medium for the recording of reality as such has evolved to unprecedented dimensions in the last twenty years and broke free of the obligations to representation as well lending itself to formal and intellectual concerns that go beyond the simple recording of situation. Vanessa Beecroft and Jeremy Kost use it to document a complex web of relations while Eberle, Ruff and Slimane use it as a final medium of physical expression in highly personal ways of interrogating the physical world, be it sex mangas, architecture, sculpture or people. Dadoune and Kimsooja approach complex political situations such as daily life in Cuba in the video of Kimsooja and the relationship to the past, the present and the museum in the case of Dadoune.

The exhibition’s title borrows a German composite word, sehnsucht. Sehnsucht is loosely and unsuccessfully translated in English as “aspiration” or “longing”. It has been a central notion to the German romantics at the turn of the 18th to 19th century and was considered as the quintessential feeling of desire for something that is no longer present or in existence. At the same time it conveys the intensity of the feeling for the loss of something and its rememoration. The notion of aspiration could be another underlying theme of this exhibition. Aspiration to beauty, to perfection, to answer the ever present question for the artist on how to approach reality and how to deal with it.